Jason Stearns responds to Harry Verhoeven’s review of ‘Dancing in the Glory of Monsters’

It is rare that I get the opportunity to argue the nuances of the Congo wars in broad public fora. Knowledge about the Congolese conflict is limited outside of a small circle of academics and policy-makers; depictions in the mainstream press are often simplistic blame games, pointing fingers alternately at Rwanda, conflict minerals or – usually by default – to the grinding chaos and savagery that, so they imply, the Congo is cursed with.

By Jason Stearns

Given the limited nature of the debate, I am glad to have an opportunity to respond to Verhoeven’s fair and useful criticism of my book. I hope this will also clarify my thoughts on some aspects of the conflict.

Most critically, Verhoeven faults me for not engaging more with the important theories of the Congo conflict. I take him to be pointing to a lack of a causal argument in my book. What is my overarching theory? What was the role of land, ethnicity, natural resources and western powers in fueling the conflict?

I have two responses to this criticism. First, my book’s main objective is to tackle “Congo reductionism” – the tendency to reduce the conflict to a kabuki theatre of savage warlords, greedy businessmen and innocent victims. In this sense, I spend most of the book complicating, and not streamlining, any causal argument. Typically, attempts to point to the one main cause of the conflict have ended up providing simplistic solutions to complex problems. That was the case, for example, with the fixation on the ex-FAR and Interahamwe to the detriment of other motives that Rwanda and its allies had for intervening in the Congo. More recently, advocates’ focus on sexual violence and conflict minerals has ignored the complex sources of Congo’s problems at their peril. Even the notion that local conflicts over land and authority are the main reason for violence today – an argument that has gained some traction recently – neglects the knotted politics surrounding armed group formation in the Kivus and Ituri.

Above all, we need to take the Congolese on their own terms and engage with the ragged complexity of the conflict. Most of my book spins the stories of these Congolese actors, trying to decipher their motives, trying to bring their humanity – if not necessarily their decency – home to the reader. I don’t think foreigners will ever be able to work constructively with any of the leaders in the region until we can understand their interests and attitudes. This goes for the most burning challenges: revenue transparency, security sector reform and transitional justice.

Given this emphasis on actors, their stories and the complexity of the conflict, I can understand how one might find my book lacking in leitmotifs and theory. But I would suggest that my book has different ambitions than the excellent volumes by Filip Reyntjens and Gerard Prunier mentioned by Verhoeven. I do not pretend to provide a succinct theory of the Congo war; that would go against the grain of my narrative.

Nonetheless, I do address, albeit briefly, many of the issues that the review finds lacking. Like both Reyntjens and Prunier, I locate the origins of the Congo war at the nexus of local, national and regional developments. This confluence – the decay of the Zairian state, local struggles over land and power, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 – is, as the review states, well-known and not controversial.

What is more contentious is foreign involvement during the war. Here I differ from Reyntjens and Prunier, if only slightly. After many dozen interviews with Congolese and Rwandan protagonists of the wars, I found little evidence for American military involvement in support of any parties during the wars. The AFDL rebellion (1996-1997) – which has often been rumored to have received US military support – had enough firepower coming from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Eritrea, Angola and a handful of other Africa countries. Nor could I find much support in my interviews for an international corporate conspiracy in support of any of the wars, although many foreign companies did make considerable profits during the war, and US policy has been sadly short-sighted on many occasions. Overall, however, the greatest sins of western countries have been ones of omission and ignorance, not of direct exploitation. We simply have not cared enough about a crisis that is too complex to fit into a sound-bite. This has led at times to one-dimensional policy-making and the search for simple heroes and villains when the roles are much more complex than that.

As for Rwanda, I leave little room for doubt about its complicity in widespread human rights abuses in the Congo, not all of which have seen the light of justice. However, Rwanda’s motives have been complex and have shifted over time. Security predominated during the initial phases of both 1996 and 1998 invasions, as rebels launched attacks into Rwanda from the Kivu provinces. Financial considerations took on an ever more important role after 1999, as individuals and the ruling party in Kigali took advantage of business opportunities in the eastern Congo. Finally, a political calculus crept into Rwandan thinking: a weak, chaotic Congo was expedient to justify internal repression and to prevent a strong, dangerous neighbour from emerging. This complex mix of motives in its relations with its neighbour have been refracted through a fiercely hubristic and militaristic prism, which led to their clumsy dealings with Laurent Kabila in 1996 and their attempts to quickly topple him in 1998. Which of these motives, however, has predominated at which point in time, is difficult to discern.

Finally, perhaps a word about probably the most important causal factor that sticks out in my account: the profound weakness of Congolese political institutions. All these other factors, from land conflicts to mining, have become salient precisely because no state has emerged as an arbiter of these resources and disputes. The corruption of the state – and the corrosion of most forms of political organization over centuries of slavery, rubber trade and colonialism – has allowed criminal networks to flourish and small disputes to escalate. This state of affairs has undermined the state’s ability to enforce contracts and guarantee private assets – a commitment problem that political scientists like Verhoeven have focused on.

Closely linked to this institutional fragility is a crisis in moral leadership, which I hope resounds clearly in the book. With few viable social or political institutions, collective action becomes difficult. Those who do take a stand for their ideological beliefs are chopped down or simply kicked to the sidelines.

State fragility and a moral crisis of leadership are not easily packaged into media reports, and solutions for these challenges are difficult to find, in the Congo and elsewhere. But these are probably the main obstacles the country will have to overcome over next decades.

As for Verhoeven’s criticism that I left out important parts of the war – I can only plead mea culpa. There is only so much one can do in a book, especially one that aims at bringing the Congoelse conflict to a broader audience. Perhaps a second volume will be necessary.

Being engaged by critics isnâ€™t necessarily a bad thing. The more flak a book obtains, the more people would want to check it out for themselvesâ€”which insures that the book would go viral, so to speak. This being your first globally-released book (not counting your academic essays and the fantastic job you did in what I call â€œThe Jason Stearns UN Report by a Panel of Expertsâ€), you are lucky enough to have critics such as Harry Verhoeven help you grow thick skin. As the old sexist saying has it, this will make a man outta you!

I was particularly impressed by your perfect mastery of Lingala and Swahili (on top of French) when I met you last year at your Johns Hopkins-SAIS talk in DC. And, by the way, at that talk, you unpacked an impressive theory of the Congo conflict that was by no means â€œimpressionist,â€ as Verhoeven castigates your analysis of events in your book. Incidentally, I like impressionistic takes on irreducible events like the ones that unfolded in the Congo as there canâ€™t possibly be metanarratives that would do them justice. In fact, novels or fiction in general might even be a better conduit for them than cold analytical exposes.

This being said, I take this opportunity to point out the following:

1) I have to agree with Verhoevenâ€™s criticism of your relying too much for your â€œevidenceâ€ upon a few historical agents involved in the conflict. I think this is a â€œmethodologicalâ€ drawback that could be addressed in your subsequent books (not this one, as you eloquently state). This is mainly due to a lack of methodological interchange between European and American historiographers. The Belgian social scientist and historian BenoÃ®t Verhaegen, for example, wrote almost definitive histories of the Congo 1964 rebellions using the method of â€œhistoire immediateâ€ (immediate history)â€”a method also used by Spanish scholars to write histories from the WWII to the current time (it is telling that the Wikipedia page on â€œHistoire immediateâ€ has only a Spanish Language equivalent page: â€œHistoria del mundo actualâ€ or â€œhistoria immediateâ€). But immediate history is expensive, painstaking, and involves hundreds (if not thousands) of informants and documents.

2) You also claim that you â€œfound little evidence for American military involvement in support of any parties during the wars.â€ I think that this claim is naÃ¯ve. Prunier cites one or several sources (I donâ€™t quite remember and I canâ€™t check this out at the moment, having left my copy of his book in my library in Kinshasa) that establish that the rush for the Congo Coltan originated at the desk of the trade liaison at the American embassy in Kigali. Whatâ€™s more, I think you donâ€™t factor in the military aid Rwanda was (and is) receiving from the US and its allies while it was engaged in a military campaign of pillage in the Congo–even now that the Kigali regime is murdering, jailing, and stifling opposition politicians). And the US didnâ€™t make a mystery of its support for Rwanda and Uganda, insisting that what was happening in eastern Congo was a domestic rebellion. Anecdotally I had personally an irate email exchange with a State Department official in the early days of Laurent Kabila regime. The man wanted to enlist me in the policy that was developing for turning the DRC into an English-speaking country! When I showed him the madness of the project, he characterized my reaction as a â€œtypical visceral reaction from a member of the French-speaking Congolese eliteâ€â€”though I had already established to him that I wasnâ€™t by any stretch of imagination part of the Congo elite.

3) More importantly, Congolese in general are angry when people have their histories so irretrievably â€œpiratedâ€ by events in Rwanda. Congolese have enough existential angst of their own to contend with to be needlessly bombarded by Rwandan narratives. Itâ€™s about time people start offering narratives about the Congolese and what befell them from Rwandan and Ugandan military plunderous entrepreneurs. For example, the city of Kisangani was almost erased from the map by Rwandan and Ugandan armies. We still want to read about the â€œhistoire immediateâ€ narratives of those bloody events.

Sorry for the rant, Jason. But rest assured that Iâ€™ll always admire your engagement for the Congo, as well as your scholarly work and advocacy commitmentâ€”including this, your invaluable blog.

The same problem is all over Africa .Mr Mugabe blames the misfortunes of this country on Britain .Lack of good governance is the main problem .According to a report by The BBC ,the warlord ,Paul Kaegame ,of Rwanda is still active in the area .Just have a look,at my country the Sudan or what is left out of it .In 1958 ,Sudan was richer than South Korea .The country is bankrupt now .